A bicycle has a recognizable form – two wheels, couple of bars in between. A child would draw one like this:

Yet, if you ask a child what a bicycle does, at a certain age, their face will light up as they recall their last bicycle ride (or fall, if they did) and they will respond with something like “WHEEEEEEEE!”

If you ask that child what their body looks like, you’d get a pretty serious look for a little bit, and then something like this:

And then, if you ask them what their body does, you’d probably get an imitation of a rude noise. Oh well, can’t win them all, right?

We focus so much on what FORM our bodies take and ignore their FUNCTION.

What about haiku celebrating body’s function?

Summer turns to fall
Like leaves, hair fades to white
I talk with salmon

????

Op-Ed Columnist – Congress, Up in Arms – NYTimes.com

Let me emphasize that none of us wants a terrorist to be able to purchase a gun, said Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who nevertheless went on to argue against allowing the government to use the terrorist watch list to keep anyone from being able to purchase, um, a gun.

Faisal Shahzad Arrest: Lieberman Proposes Taking Away Citizenship Of Suspected Terrorists

Joe Lieberman has a creative solution: Take away their citizenship. “If you’ve joined an enemy of the United States in attacking the United States and trying to kill Americans, I think you should sacrifice your rights of citizenship,” Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, told reporters Tuesday.

Folks, I’m not convinced that it’s Middle Easterners we need to worry about. Just because none of these men joined a foreign militant force, does that make what they did any less wrong? Does it make the people they killed any less dead?

I have a great idea. How about if we find a way to sell firearms to people who want them and whom have passed some sort of “not going to go apeshit and kill people” criteria, and then, if something happens, one of them snaps, we use the due process of our laws to show him or her that it’s not acceptable to do that, get the message across to the next person, and at the same time, use what we learn from the episode to try and prevent it from happening again.

I knew a bright 14-year old boy once. His mother took pride in his ability, even at that age, to debate – even when what he was debating was his own punishment. I remember her being sure that he’d make a great lawyer someday, if that’s what he chose.

He will never be that lawyer. He’ll never be anything now, except dead. At 18, he was shot, walking down a street in Philadelphia, the wrong place, and the wrong time. And it barely even made the news. Because, ya know, a young man gets shot walking down the street in Philly, that’s not news. That’s just what happens. There was a deal one winter, buried deep in the newspaper with the gossip section, where someone was shot and killed because his neighbor objected to the direction in which he was shoveling snow. Get that – he was shoveling snow out of his driveway so he could get his car out. And the guy next door didn’t like the way he was shoveling that snow, so he shot his neighbor.

Saturday, I spent so much time searching every game shop in town for something called “Walk It Out”, which I’d seen favorably reviewed by another WW forum user (she said she walked for 70 minutes and barely noticed the time go by). Folks, Eugene is Sold Out of this game. Best Buy had never even heard of it – even though, when I called to ask them, they said Yes, sure, we have that. When I got there, however, it was a different story completely. “You want what? I’ve never even heard of that. Let me check our web site to see if we even carry it.” (Note: as of this writing, they don’t.)

I finally gave up and went home for a late lunch. Thanks to the providence of Diane asking me an unrelated question about tickets, I recalled at 5 that we had tickets to the Hult Center to see Play! A Video Game Symphony at 7:30. We quickly threw on something that would pass for “dressed-up, Eugene style” and headed out for dinner and theater.

The symphony was wonderful. There’s just something about hearing Super Mario from a full orchestra. And it was intriguing to me that the games I’ve never played (*cough*Oblivion*cough*) meant so little to me, even though the music was beautiful. As I pointed out to my Spouse Creature on the way back to the car, it was like watching Peter and the Wolf all over again – each instrument or instrument type tended to represent certain things. High-tech things like robots and spaceships? Kettle drums and Tubas. Wild animals? Flute. Green, verdant scenery? Strings. And so on.

Super Mario Theme – Play Symphony

Sunday, we had breakfast together and then I packed up to leave. I drove down to Medford for the Oregon Nonprofit Leaders’ Conference. To listen to, I picked up an audiobook copy of “Rapt”, by Winifred Gallagher, about the ways in which we pay attention (or don’t) and what it means for our quality of life. Really, really recommend this book – it’s a good summary of research in the area. Not much in the way of how-to ideas or fixes, except for a comment in chapter 5(?) that Buddhist monks who meditate regularly show wildly different MRI scans and tend to be significantly more well than the average, untrained Joe. Reminds me that I do feel better when I meditate regularly, so I”ll have to look at scheduling that in somehow.

Book
Review: ‘Rapt’ by Winifred Gallagher – washingtonpost.com

Spending
an hour doing just one thing — such as reading a book or practicing a
musical instrument — may soon be the equivalent of wearing spats. This
would probably be a bad thing. As Gallagher puts it, if you grow up
processing information at a superficial level, “when you’re finally
forced to confront intellectually demanding situations in high school or
college, you may find that you’ve traded depth of knowledge for breadth
and stunted your capacity for serious thought.”

The conference was good, I met lots of people that I’ve spoken to on the phone who do a lot of good work down in Southern Oregon. I gave a short talk on where to begin and technology planning, and even if all anyone got out of it was to evaluate new technological tools like blogs, facebook, laptops, web-enabled phones, etc etc etc, in terms of whether or not the tools will meet their goals, I’ve succeeded. I got several compliments afterwards, which made me feel a whole lot better, and then I sat in as an assistant on the social media talk afterwards before I left. They hardly needed any help, though, so I settled for tweeting main points from the talk.

I found the “Walk It Out” disk I was looking for in the mall in Medford, and  more audiobook on the way home, (still interesting!). Chapter 6 was all about how we say that our families and our home life are Ever So Important, and then we barely make any effort to Be Here Now when we’re home and spending time with these very important people. Gave me some food for thought. Got to give my new game a try (Phew! Fast stepping) before bed.

Been looking at the new e-readers after participating in a survey/contest with an e-reader as a prize.

OMFG is this a clusterf*** of a market still. I was pretty young when the Betamax/VHS thing happened, so I missed out on most of it.

I’ve heard nothing good about the Sony Reader. Which is just as well, since Borders.com doesn’t offer e-books for sale on the website. To get even a listing of e-books for purchase, you have to download and install a Windows-only library app.

I’ve heard a lot of negative things about the Kindle. While the fiasco with the Orwell books last year seemed to make sense once it came down to facts and not internet panic, I’m still not real comfy with having books I’ve purchased just disappear and the money for them just reappear. Not without some better kind of notice. I’d much prefer an email saying Hi, we sold you this book under some questionable circumstances, with directions on how to return the book. Or they could take a cue from software – if I exceed the trial period on my software or if I fail to properly license the software, no-one comes along and secretly uninstalls it from my computer. Instead, they give it a big error when I go to open it again telling me how to fix the problem.

On top of that, it seems that books purchased for the Kindle are licensed to the device, not the person. Lose or break your reader, buy your books over again. Because there’s so much precedence in copyright law for moving to a new location and installing new bookshelves requiring you to purchase new copies of your books to be compatible with the new shelves.

However, option three, the B&N Nook, seemed on the surface to be heading in the right direction. Android-based, with the possibility of 3rd party apps to install later, when B&N opens up the SDK for developers. But it’s not real encouraging when I visit B&N.com to review information and find…..
A. their desktop reader app doesn’t work with my Mac version. It’s 10.5 or later only.
B. the “sample” I requested of a book I was considering purchasing included, when I finally found a reader that worked on my OS, the title page and table of contents. Absolutely no sample content at all. (to be fair, this may have been a publisher decision, not a B&N decision. Either way, whoever made that call needs to be slapped with a fish.)
C. Absolutely no “technical” information about the device and it’s compatibility with other devices. The “Tech Specs” page literally starts out by telling you what’s in the box. (a USB cable and a power adapter, if you’re wondering) and then has various boxes devoted to outlining the features of the device. Even in the FAQs, I don’t find anything telling me either why I’d want to plug it into my computer (loading music and other files onto the device?) and if it will be compatible with my older, 10.4 Mac.
D. The book I was looking at (Steamed: A Steampunk Romance) costs $6.39 as a digital download. It’s on the shelf at Target for $5.99. I know that the ability of stores like Target and CostCo to buy huge quantities of best-sellers cheaply is a large part of what’s hurting the writing and publishing market right now, but…. Really? You can’t even manage to match the competition when they’ve got shipping and stocking costs and you’re offering a digital download?

If my name is drawn in a couple of weeks as the contest winner, right now, I’d probably get the Nook. If my name isn’t drawn…. well, maybe in a couple of years the market will figure itself out and we’ll get adequate customer service, a common reader format, reliable and open Wi-Fi, and fewer pinheads butting heads over who’s privilege it is to do things like set prices. In short, hey, maybe we’ll eventually get to a reader-driven market instead of a bookstore-driven one.

Today’s MUSING MONDAYS post is about reading non-fiction…

Do you read non-fiction regularly? Do you read it in a different way or place than you read fiction? (question courtesy of Diane)

Yes, I do. And I do read it differently – non-fiction takes more brain processing power, since it’s not just a nice story, and so I tend to read it more earlier in the day or on weekends, when I’ve got the extra time and space to think about something a little harder.

Symbolic? Or Not?

My husband is not an avid reader, and he used to get very frustrated in college when teachers would insist discussing symbolism in a literary work when there didn’t seem to him to be any. He felt that writers often just wrote the story for the story’s sake and other people read symbolism into it.

It does seem like modern fiction just “tells the story” without much symbolism. Is symbolism an older literary device, like excessive description, that is not used much any more? Do you think there was as much symbolism as English teachers seemed to think? What are some examples of symbolism from your reading?

Oh good heavens. I don’t think symbolism is ever going to be outdated. Nor is allegory, themes, or any other of the subjects we all chafed at learning in high school literature class.

First of all, I have to take a short tangent to point out that “modern fiction” is a slippery character. While mine is not the English degree in my family (there are two), if I recall correctly, “modern fiction” pretty much covers anything written after we left serialized storytelling to soap operas and comic books. Kafka and Woolf, both from the 1920s, are considered to be “modern fiction” – as is William Golding, Whassisname Hemingway, and William James (whom I have never successfully read).

Golding’s Lord of the Flies (which I hated) is highly symbolic. Shipful of lost boys stranded on an island with no adults to tell them what to do. Literary study of what happens in society if there is no higher authority to praise the worthy or punish the unworthy. Even the title references Beezlebub, itself a symbol of the evil that will run rampant without authority.

Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea also contains symbolism, although English teachers use the book more to illustrate themes. If the theme of the book is man’s place in relation to nature, the fish stands in as a symbol for all of nature.

Getting away from high school English class, however, let’s look at some other varieties of “modern fiction”….

Here’s one few would expect to find high-falutin’ things like symbolism and theme in: Mercedes Lackey’s Fairy Godmother. In this book, Elena – a failed Cinderella figure whose prince still thinks girls have cooties and certainly isn’t holding a ball anytime soon – accepts a job as a godmother’s apprentice. As she meets the Fairy Queen, whose approval she needs in order to start working magic, she is warned of all of the things which might befall a godmother and her region.

“It was one thing to be warned about the evil magicians, and to remember all of the things she had read and heard. It was quite another to see them at work, in rapid succession. And some — were horrors.

Some of the horrors were blatant — entire countries laid to waste, the inhabitants made into hopeless slaves, afraid to do anything but obey because of the cost of disobedience. Some of the evil ones were precisely as she might have expected, gloating despots squatting on thrones they had no right to, torture and exploitation the hallmarks of their reigns.

But some were subtle, and once Elena realized what she was seeing, the implications were chilling. Often the evil one was not on the throne itself, but was the power behind it, whispering into the monarch’s ear. The effect was insidious; rather than creating despair for all, the dark one created factions, pitting the privileged, wealthy, and titled against those beneath them, placing the effort of exploitation one layer below the monarch. This kept despair from being total, for there was always the hope — ‘But when the King learns of this…’ — even though the hope was destined never to be fulfilled. These spiders spun a cunning web, beginning as they always did by eroding conditions gradually, with rights converted to privilege, then the privilege revoked on one pretense or another, always for an excellent reason, always on a ‘temporary’ basis, until the next ‘privilege’ was taken and the previous grievance forgotten.”

No matter what your politics are, it seems obvious that this passage is symbolic – whether Lackey meant it to be or not – of what a particular faction in US politics claimed was happening through most of the 2000s – and of several historical and political precedents before then.

And that’s part of the thing – the writer of a book only does about two-thirds of the work of creating meaning with his or her words. Each reader will read and interpret those words slightly differently. What the writer intended is important, but what the reader sees is equally important. This will upset several people, I know, as there are roots in that belief that extend far into identity politics and political correctness – to wit, that it doesn’t necessarily matter whether you intended your words to offend (although if you did, shame on you). If they DO offend, feelings are hurt, people are upset, etc etc, and you need to step up and handle it with something other than complaining that since offense wasn’t intended, it shouldn’t exist.

Want to give some acknowledgement to other bloggers who’ve answered this question. Pop over and read their responses if you find this interesting.

I think symbolism is usually secondary to the story anyway, and can add meaning if you look for it, but is not essential enjoying the story in any way.

Florinda in California adds this thought in her post:

Some genre fiction, particularly fantasy, is practically built on symbolism. (This occurred to me as I scrolled past the His Dark Materials trilogy in my LT catalog.)

Another blogger writes:

So, the better question would be — are you drawn to symbolic writing? Do you try to read complex literature from time-to-time? Do you make a point of reading the literary award winners each year?

The Book Lady’s Blog points out that Piggy’s glasses in my hated Lord of the Flies are symbolic of the intellectualism and civilization – just as Piggy’s girth and slow pace are symbolic of the inability of that intellectual, civilized world to adjust to the rules of the “new” anarchic universe the boys find themselves in. Really, go and read her post.

Pardon me a small grumble here.

Twits.

Sure, Facebook Causes may not drive substantial amounts of donations – yet – but it does something useful to raise awareness. MySpace Causes would, too, if they were more stringent about what a “cause” was.

And, here on Earth, awareness means something. Money ain’t everything, MSNBC, no matter what your big corporate ad-driven people tell you. When it comes to causes, spreading awareness counts, too.

Next up, MSNBC picks on benefit concerts because more people watch them on TV than buy tickets or donate.

Gang, SMTP Authentication is everywhere. It’s not going anywhere any time soon. Y’all better start getting used to it.

As my regular readers ought to know by now, my day job (i.e., when I’m not behind the camera or curled around a book) is working as an IT Consultant. The organization I work for operates 1 email server and 3 web servers. Our mail server runs on SmarterMail, which is a really incredible and underknown mail server. Easy to use, pretty darn secure, etc etc.

Our mail server employs SMTP authentication for all 12-15 of the domains we host email for. This is, generally, a good thing. SMTP authentication is NOT new anymore, and most commercial ISPs employ it or some other form of SMTP security.

And yet, the email newsletter services, the membership management services…… even big service providers (cough, cough, Salesforce) fail to support SMTP-Auth. Forcing email providers whose subscribers use these services to either refuse to support them or to poke holes in email security for umpteen different IP addresses.

This is beyond ridiculous. Isn’t it time yet to catch up to pre-Web-2.0 tech? Either provide your own email servers which send mail from your system out (with the appropriate reply address attached, of course) or allow your users to configure a login and password for SMTP auth when they configure their mail server address. It’s as simple as that.

Yesterday, April 15th, was Tax Day here in the U.S., which means lots of lucky people will get refunds of over-paid taxes.

Whether you’re one of them or not, what would you spend an unexpected windfall on? Say … $50? How about $500?

(And, this is a reading meme, so by rights the answer should be book-related, but hey, feel free to go wild and splurge on anything you like.)

Oh, that’s an easy question. Not book related, but I already spent my over-paid taxes on a new camera. I wanted to replace the old camera before it failed, so now I have two, one new camera and the old one as a backup.

This makes me a very happy photographer. I just need to find more things to shoot with my new camera!

Here’s the question:

Some people read one book at a time. Some people have a number of them on the go at any given time, perhaps a reading in bed book, a breakfast table book, a bathroom book, and so on, which leads me to…

1. Are you currently reading more than one book?
2. If so, how many books are you currently reading?
3. Is this normal for you?
4. Where do you keep your current reads?

1. Well. Probably. There’s a couple that I started reading, then set down and fully intend to finish.

2. I dunno. Maybe 3?
3. Not really. This is pretty new, just something I’ve been doing for the last year or so. I’m having more “goldfish days”, days when my mental fortitude isn’t up to anything much more challenging than Dick and Jane, so the nonfiction books that I enjoy, I’ve been reading alongside something lighter.
4. Where-ever they happen to land. Seriously. There’s usually 2 or 3 books near the dinner table, several near my desk, one next to the bed, and one next to the sofa. Occasionally, I’ll set one down in the kitchen while I’m cooking.